Requirements

To manage alerts, you have to familiarize yourself with several concepts first. You need to know what are events and actions. Before you start with alert management, please read at least the topic Concepts, which discusses these issues.

Prerequisites

To begin managing alerts, you have to define a set of events first. Events tell nVision in which situation the alert should be raised. For example, after installation there is a predefined event: “Host down”. It describes the event when the host stops responding. You should define events for all possible problematic situations you want to monitor.

After events are defined you will probably want to define some notification actions. Actions describe what nVision should do when an event is raised. For example an action may define how to notify you with an e-mail. However, it is possible to define alerts without actions - it is sometimes useful when you only need the information about an event for future reports and you don’t need any notification.

After the above steps are done, you can start managing alerts. Please refer to the following topics describing available functions.

Where we can define alerts

Alerts can be defined on several levels of the atlas. First, we can define global alerts for the whole atlas. Such alerts will be inherited by all hosts in the atlas, which means that such alert conditions will be checked for every host and it can be raised on any host (if it meets the criteria defined in the alert; for example, an alert defined to be valid only for important hosts will not be raised on hosts with importance set to low).

Alerts can be also defined for each map. In this case, such alerts are inherited by all hosts on this map and also by all descendant maps in the atlas tree. And finally, alerts can be defined for each host.

You have then several ways of setting alerts to configure proper alerting based on the importance of your hosts, network, services, etc. Keep in mind that alerts are inherited from parent objects to descendants. Refer to Inherited alerts topic for more information.